JOURNALIST Q&A: Linda Fung

In her career at Dow Jones, Linda Fung has had a range of roles, from Chicago bureau chief to assistant managing editor. Recently, she was named deputy managing editor at Dow Jones News Service, where, among other duties, she serves as the liaison between the newswire and The Wall Street Journal. Here she talks to PRWeek about her promotion.

In her career at Dow Jones, Linda Fung has had a range of roles, from Chicago bureau chief to assistant managing editor. Recently, she was named deputy managing editor at Dow Jones News Service, where, among other duties, she serves as the liaison between the newswire and The Wall Street Journal. Here she talks to PRWeek about her promotion.

PRWeek: What are your responsibilities in your new post?Linda Fung: I help run the newsroom of over 100 editors and reporters on staff in Jersey City, NJ, which is our main headquarters. We've got a spot-news editing desk of about 40 editors and a reporting group of 50 reporters. Most of the press releases from the companies come into the spot-news desk. A lot of times, our reporters will take those stories that have been rewritten into business briefs and turn them into broader analysis stories and perhaps see if there's more to be done for that company's competitors. My job is to make sure we keep on top of that news. I'm also responsible for coordinating with editors and reporters at The Wall Street Journal to make sure we don't duplicate efforts on earnings news stories or other types of spot-news stories.
PRWeek:Do you plan to make any changes?Fung: It's always run smoothly, but I want to bring in new content, new features for the wire to complement what we already provide. One area we'd like to work on more is the financial advisory business. That's where we see the biggest growth area in terms of subscribers and news in the years ahead. More and more of Wall Street is moving away from the traditional brokerage model into the financial advisory model, where it's fee-based. We're getting more interest in news stories about what these financial advisers are doing, what areas they're looking at to invest in for their customers. We're seeing more and more of that with the hedge-fund business, the pension-fund business and the ETF [exchange traded fund] business.
PRWeek: What would you like to see PR people do better?Fung: I'd like to see them understand Dow Jones Newswires' audience and its product. Often I get calls from people who don't realize that we publish business news. They have to understand that our subscriber base is made up of over 300,000 brokers, traders, people in the financial advisory business who are most interested in news scoops we can run on the wire or interesting feature stories.
PRWeek: What are some of the larger business trends you'll be covering in upcoming months?
Fung: The big stories will be whether the mergers and acquisitions business has picked up. We've seen in recent months some big mergers, but I think some people are still not convinced that it's a long-term trend. Some people try to predict that to get an idea of whether the stock-market rally is going to continue. Corporate governance remains a big issue.
Name: Linda Fung
Company: Dow Jones News Service
Title: Deputy managing editor
Preferred contact method:linda.fung@dowjones.com